


Revelations

by celli-inkblots (thebeespatella)



Category: Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-23
Updated: 2012-05-23
Packaged: 2017-11-05 21:34:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,547
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/411246
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thebeespatella/pseuds/celli-inkblots
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Sometimes he dreams too, but it’s always of an absurdly rainy day and a threadbare skeleton in his backyard. Generosity in a moment of intense selfishness – maybe she’ll see me, maybe I could have her for my own. He didn’t know that girls burned and charred too.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Revelations

**Author's Note:**

> So I finished reading The Hunger Games series and was so, so dissatisfied with the epilogue and had so, so many different ideas for how it should have ended otherwise that I decided to write one. It’s been a really long time since I’ve written, so it’s a bit awkward, but it’s also felt so good. I’ll probably polish it up at some point soon.

It’s maybe mid-afternoon when he hears the knock on the door. The sunlight is wearing the simple wooden room with too much grace for the events that had transpired earlier that day – Katniss upstairs, sleeping after a violent flashback (he warned the children to be careful with their glasses), and the children were rushed off to school under the supervision of Haymitch, of all people. As Peeta walks to the door, his feet fall with dread anticipation.

The door swings open just as he goes to put his hand on the doorknob. “Hello.” He can’t help raising his eyebrows a little.

“I didn’t mean to. Didn’t think your door would be unlocked.” They do the strange scuffling dance of people being let into a home, and Gale puts down his bow and arrows (Peeta has to look away) and wipes his feet on the doormat. There is an awkward silence, as they stand in the hallway without the one person that connects them by a thread of memory. “It seems like it’s been a dry summer.”

Burning. Scorching, actually. “They promised rain a few weeks earlier,” Peeta says lightly. “Never came, as you can see.”

“The primroses are dying outside.”

Peeta keeps silent. It’s Katniss’s chore, to go out and water them. They’re not his to bear. “Are they?”

Gale looks at him, directly for the first time.

“Would you like something to drink? Sit down.” Peeta pulls them into the formal living room, which is a little dusty across the mantle of the fireplace and the corners underneath the chairs where the children got lazy with their brooms.

“Just water, please.” Peeta goes into the kitchen, loudly clinking glasses and a pitcher of water.

“Here.” He carefully sips his own water, watching Gale. Still tall, and lean, no sign of the gut that threatened every man his age. Dark hair streaked with gray, and lines deeply graven into the sides of his eyes. “Difficult time, up in Two?”

“A dissident here, a dissident there. I had a lot of paperwork to get through, certainly.” A forced laugh.   

Peeta frowns, face surely asking the unspoken question. For that facial expression alone, Gale could probably have him arrested. “I’m sure they got what they deserved.”

“Don’t – ” Gale begins.

“Don’t what?” Peeta says, and upon getting no answer: “Don’t what, Gale?”

“I have to watch.” Gale’s hand is trembling ever so slightly, only highlighted by the sunlight. It really has been a hot summer.

“It’s what the constitution demands.” His voice bends like a reluctant fork against an oak table on the word ‘constitution’, the strength of metal giving will to force.

“I know. I – I wrote it. I wrote that in.” Gale’s words have the air of being repeated – to journalists, to dissidents, to children, to himself in the dark. “I wrote that so the power of prosecutor would never be abused.”

“Still doesn’t make it easier, does it?” Peeta asks, drawing a perverse delight in watching Gale so broken. Fighting the Capitol smoothed over the jagged edges of their relationship, but the day shows that bones that were never set heal crooked. “How do you execute them?”

“It’s not fair for you to ask me that.”

“Why not?”

Gale sighs and puts down his water. “I never…I was so young.”

“You never know how things turn out, until the end.”

“Speaking of which, where’s Katniss?” Gale says abruptly. “I’m – I’m not here for political discussion, Peeta, I’m here for – ”

“ – Her.” Peeta’s mouth curls around the word like a cold lizard. “She’s upstairs. Flashbacks.”

“It’s always worse in the summer,” Gale says.

“It’s never better,” Peeta retorts. “The children dropped their cups – the glass shattered, and then she – ”

Gale is silent.

“And I know she can’t help it, but – ”

“Still doesn’t make it easier, does it?” Gale answers, but there is no venom in it, just an ashy exhaustion.

Peeta can’t bring himself to say anything.

“I brought you something.” Gale reaches into the pocket of his pants, pulling out a carefully tissue-wrapped packet. “Think about it.”

“What - ?” Peeta carefully opens the packet, then places it slowly on the table. Two lilac pills. “Gale.”

“I thought you might – ”

“Get out.”

“You don’t understand – ”

“Get out. Get out of my house.”

“Peeta, I didn’t mean – ”

“GET OUT!” Peeta rises to his feet, pushing Gale forcefully, spilling the glasses from the low table, two fragile crashes identical to the morning, glass shards sparkling. A low moan from upstairs and they freeze.

Peeta glares as Gale gathers his things quickly and steps outside. He can still hear him even after the door closes. “I’m so tired,” Gale says through the door. “I thought I changed things, but I’m still nothing, and…if I could just leave, disappear…”

“You could,” Peeta says simply, and then steps away. No more poison for today. After a pause, he turns and rushes, taking the steps two at a time, reaching the bedroom in record time.

Katniss – lying in the middle of the bed, writhing as her hands clutch at invisible shoulders, fingers twitching for a bow of air.

“Katniss – I’m here, it’s a dream, a nightmare – ”

“Prim – ”

“Katniss, I’m here, it’s Peeta – ”

“Prim, Prim – ”

“No, no, come back, come on – ”

“PRIM!” Her scream as she wakes shakes Peeta’s nerves so they’re inside out, mangles everything in him until her eyes recognizing him fixes them again. “Peeta, I…I had a bad dream.”

“I know.” He cradles her body to his own, surprised that after all this time she still has room for tears. He gave them up long ago. “I know. It’s over now.”

“I just – keep seeing – ”

“Shh,” he says, instead of ‘It’s been years’, and strokes her hair.

“It’s the crashes,” she says into his shirt. “And the children. I keep seeing the reaping, only it’s both our children up on stage, and then I see Rue, only it’s not her, it’s – ”

“Keep the awful thoughts away,” he says.

“As though it’s that easy,” she mutters bitterly.

There is no response to that. Sometimes he dreams too, but it’s always of an absurdly rainy day and a threadbare skeleton in his backyard. Generosity in a moment of intense selfishness – maybe she’ll see me, maybe I could have her for my own. He didn’t know that girls burned and charred too.

“Try.” Slowly she rocks back into sleep, and he eyes the drawer in their bedside table that holds the sedatives, then decides against it. He dreads the day she’ll be nothing without them.

He goes back downstairs with only death for company. The pills look pathetic, actually, sitting on pretty paper on the low table.

He doesn’t know how Gale got them – saved them, maybe? From those dark, confused days when death did seem like the better option? Now he watches his children in their uninhibited joy, well-fed and so, so unmarred. They’re so simple. By the time he was twelve, he was already painting himself with flour so the bruises wouldn’t show at school. His name was already in seven times, his mother thinking tesserae for her worthless son a fair trade.

Sometimes Katniss whispers in the dark, that they’re playing on a graveyard. They’re playing on a graveyard, she says, and he doesn’t know how awake she is – sometimes she’s looking straight up, sometimes her eyelids fluttering like an agonized wasp.

 

He goes out to water the primroses.

 

The children come back from school just as he’s begun drizzling their hard-earned water over each plant, and he waves them inside with a smile. “I’ll be in soon.” The sun is fire in his skin, and he squints against the sweat, determined that each flower should bloom at least another year. There are fourteen in all, each for a year of Prim’s life. He never really knew her; he supposes that perhaps – with a glance at the upstairs window – perhaps he never truly understood Katniss, if he didn’t know her most precious thing. He’ll ask her for stories later today. There are no good ways to stop the pain, so some days you might as well let the blood flow free.

He barely remembers his brother. They rarely spoke, so afraid of anger. He just remembers burning. Burning at his father – he would just watch – and burning from his mother. He knows Katniss’s mother is now old, frail and clinging to life. When he watches Katniss speak soft over the phone with her, he wonders if the two are very different at all, both so wounded from a little girl who meant the world to them both.

The sun is filling his vision with white. His throat is sticking to itself with dryness. It’s like he’s watching fire rain down on Twelve – it’s just these small moments, he doesn’t thrash or cry out – it’s a shiny memory, warping with time, but there’s very little space between his brain and his mind in this heat. He tips water onto his hand to remind him of where he is, watching the droplets trickle down onto the last flower.

He comes back inside, and that’s when he knows he won’t be asking Katniss any questions tonight. His children are both kneeling next to the coffee table, eyes wide, chewing.

 

The pretty paper lies empty. 


End file.
